I used to edit Innovation Management. My book, "The Elastic Enterprise", co-authored with Nick Vitalari and described as a must read for companies that want to succeed in the new era of business - looks at how stellar companies have gone beyond innovation to a new form of wealth creation. I speak on new innovation paradigms.
I started my writing career in broadcasting and then got involved in the EU's attempt to create an ARPA-type unit, where I managed downstream satellite application pilots, at just the time commercial satellite services entered the market. I also wrote policy, pre the Web, on broadband applications, 3G (before it was invented), and Wired Cities.
I have written for many major outlets like the Wall St Journal, Times, HBR, and GigaOm, as well as producing TV for the BBC, Channel 4 and RTE. I am a research fellow at the Center For Digital Transformation at UC Irvine, where I am also an advisory board member, advisory board member at Crowdsourcing.org and Fellow of the Society for New Communications Research.
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We risk establishing an intellectual trend against rationality and in the process legitimizing today’s extraordinarily weak leadership in politics and in business.

Brooks’ case rests on research from behavioral economists and neurologists who point out that many of our actions are guided by emotions, even though we kid ourselves we are acting rationally. It’s a rallying cry for a post-enlightenment economics and policy making.

But I don’t buy this. The most important characteristic missing from public life is not emotion. We have it in bucket loads, from every President and Prime Minister who knows now that it pays to let the eyes well up.

What we really lack is a fiercer rationality. Take for example the debate over fiscal easing and Keynesian economics vs austerity. This debate is wholly emotional, both sides drawing on their pet theories, theories that are self-serving and politically comfortable – I was going to say expedient but there is no expediency here, only stupidity.

The reality is that neither policy is relevant to the more elastic economy that we face. That elastic economy has a number of characteristics that demand urgent policy actions and investments, all of them rational:

1. Paying attention to the new human interest modelthat is evolving around us – new economics, new politics, new language of wealth creation all around people: social, peer, crowd, customer in place of raw materials, capital and labor. We function in a human interest model not a business model, one where we have to deal with the continuum of worker-customer-homemaker. We are all three and can no longer market bullshit to ourselves in these different roles. The future rests with our fused behaviour in a variety of ecosystems, not in the separation of these roles.

2. Analyses of our new ecosystem economics and the wealth generating benefits of loosely coupled, multi-layered partnerships that spell the end of the enterprise as we have known it to date. Spend money on understanding it, quickly.

3. In the 1970s we realized that one of the main drivers of unemployment was labor market velocity. People were out of work for too long – yet there were jobs. Our labor market could not catch up with a changing economy. Multiply that problem 10 fold. We need recognition of the pace of change and the need to train people to adapt by becoming creative problem solvers – it means investing in people’s capacity to develop wholly new lifestyles and we need to do that quickly too. Add to the mix any policy that further speeds up employment velocity.

4. The need for a generation of leaders who know how to act as peers and to become comfortable with a new risk-cohesion equation. Business schools cannot grasp this because they are by calling, elitist.

5. The need to educate software developers in business strategy and to educate non-developers in coding and architecting solutions.

6. Recognition of new competences – business heroes like Richard Branson and Steve Jobs were able to enter new markets at will. Nick Vitalari and I called thisradical adjacency and it reflects the importance of profound human knowledge over product.

It takes neither emotion nor an empathy with the irrational to conclude that yesterday’s economic analysis belongs precisely where it is – in the past. We need a more rational discourse based on trying to understand what this new economy consists of and how it functions. I can’t help feeling that to do that we need to jettison emotions and be more hard headed.

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